Love in Country, by Richard Gayton
“This is a powerful, deeply moving novel in which my heart was wholly bound up with Ian, Reese, Doc, Thumper and Burd.” – Editors’ Choice, Historical Novel Society, 2024
Of the 2,700,000 Americans who served in Vietnam, likely about 250,000 were gay or bisexual and approximately 4,500 of those were KIA, though no records were kept. This novel is dedicated to them, along with all the other soldiers, sailors, marines, and air force personnel who died there, or brought home the trauma.
In 1968, John Reese and Ian Alexander fall in love after barely surviving the overrunning of their firebase by the North Vietnamese. Reese is falling apart, both from PTSD and fear of exposure, while Ian supports him.
Their relationship is an open secret to their squad, some of whom accept it and others recoil. But Doc, Thumper, and Burd have more important issues: survival. Burd hides his homophobia. Doc has his own issues with religion. Thumper’s overwhelmed with combat, as well as with being a Black soldier in a white-led Army.
Just before Tet, their leave is canceled for a Phoenix mission to kidnap a village official thought to be a communist operative. In charge will be Captain Heinrick, a student of Asian culture with a traumatic secret: his Vietnamese wife and son were murdered by the VC. Heinrick changes the mission to assassination, which challenges each soldier to decide what is acceptable in war. Reese wavers between following orders and defending his lover.
Running headlong into several NVA regiments, the squad faces annihilation in a massive firefight. As they near the target, Heinrick orders a civilian killed to protect their presence. The squad must warn their base of the NVA incursion. But Ian, John, and the Captain will clash in a disastrous confrontation as the squad calls on all their skill and courage to try to escape….
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BLOSSOMS ON A POISONED SEA, by Mariko Tatsumoto.
Honorably mentioned at the annual Freeman Book Awards, this elegantly told yet horrifying novel is based on the true story of one of history’s most shocking corporate betrayals and industrial disasters.
Yuki is the daughter of a poor fisherman. Kiyo’s the son of a senior executive at Chisso, a huge chemical conglomerate. In 1956, they meet and become friends, then gradually fall in love. But then all living things in the once beautiful Minamata Bay suddenly die. The impoverished people living around it begin suffering from a terrifying disease that causes agonizing pain, paralysis, and death . . . including Yuki’s family. With no fish to catch and incapacitated from the disease, her parents are starving. As the sole wage earner, Yuki’s reduced to low-paying, backbreaking work as a laborer, then as a house cleaner.
The citydwellers, who work at Chisso, turn their backs on the lower-class fisherfolk, who largely tend to get the disease. The corporation stonewalls, denying culpability. Kiyo fails to convince his father to get the company to help. As the suffering spreads, Kiyo helps researchers find answers to the devastating neurological disease. Blocked by the government and the corporate-influenced media, Yuki and Kiyo must fight both the Japanese government and a powerful and ruthless corporation to save her family and the bay.
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Coyote Weather, by Amanda Cockrell
“Amanda Cockrell is a master magician.” — George Garrett, author of Death of the Fox, The Succession, Entered from the Sun
“Coyote Weather is a spectacular re-creation of a lost but essential time in our history—California, the ‘60s, Viet Nam—nobody has ever captured it more accurately or written it with more understanding—from several different perspectives. A must-read. Bravo!” — Lee Smith, author of Guests on Earth
Coyote weather is the feral, hungry season in California, when everything is drought-stricken and ready to catch fire. It’s 1967 and the American culture is violently remaking itself while the country is forcing its young men to fight in a deeply unpopular war. Jerry has stubbornly made no plans for the future because he believes that, in the shadow of Vietnam, the Cold War and atomic bomb drills, there won’t be one. Ellen’s determined to have a plan, because nothing else can keep the world from tilting. And the Ghost just wants to go home to a place that won’t let him in: the small California town where they all grew up.
Trade Paperback, $19.95 Ebook Edition, $8.99
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The Gettysburg Duology, by Edison McDaniels
“An amazingly talented writer … Not One Among Them Whole is a magnificently harrowing trip into the bloody horrors of the battle of Gettysburg, populated with unforgettable characters and written with stunning precision and beauty.” — Taylor Polites, author of The Rebel Wife
“At first glance it resembles The Killer Angels and Cold Mountain — and its artistry rivals those great novels. But it explores a deeper heart of darkness than even the shambles exhausted surgeons have to deal with after Gettysburg.” — David Poyer, author of A Country of Our Own and The Shiloh Project
“…great pacing and vivid characterization, with a gift for writing convincing dialogue. Original and unsettling.” — FG Cottam, author of The Magdalena Curse and The Colony
Not One Among Them Whole
It is the summer of 1863, and the greatest battle ever fought on American soil is in full tilt. Southern Pennsylvania has become one great grinding stone and thousands of dead or dying are its grist. In this tilted landscape, reputations are made, careers are ruined, and two armies are intent on killing one another. Yet opportunity is everywhere.
For the privates and officers who fight the battle, salvation or damnation is just a bullet away. For the surgeons laboring over the wounded, opportunity knocks at the bloody tables, where the price of a man’s life is all too often an arm or a leg. The cost to the surgeons, however, will be even higher.
For one undertaker in particular, the dead are a canvas, and his ability to make a body reflect the living individual is uncanny. For Jupiter Jones, the burgeoning dead are the opportunity. And finally, for one teenage slave, alive only because his father had the courage to bury him, opportunity comes in the form of a ten-year-old boy with a creel and one shoe, who may or may not be a ghost …
In the summer of 1863, humanity itself is under siege. What happens amid the carnage and human flotsam of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, will be unholy, unnerving, and all but unbearable, with only this certain: not one among them will escape unscathed.
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The Matriarch of Ruins, by Edison McDaniels
Husbands and wives. Sons and daughters. Soldiers and surgeons. Free men and slaves. Widows and ghosts.
It is summer, 1863, and the war has come home to the Gamble farm in Southern Pennsylvania. With her husband buried under the willow tree in the backyard, newly-widowed Purdy Gamble must cope with losing him all over again when a rebel surgeon conscripts her farm for use as a Confederate hospital. Hannah, Purdy’s daughter, disappears into the chaos of war to chase her own ghosts, both imaginary and real. And then there are the twins Loli and Coal, just fourteen. One, struck dumb by a mule kick at age five, will find a disturbing peace amid the flames of war. The other will twice save a man’s life, unearthing a family secret in the process—a secret at once as alive as warm flesh and as dead as cold bones moldering under the ground.
The Matriarch of Ruins is a haunting story of lost love, moral dilemmas, and the ruin of war.
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Autobiography of the Lower East Side, by Rashidah Ismaili
“This well-established poet makes a brilliant debut in fiction with these complex, poetically detailed, interrelated stories of Blacks from Africa, the Caribbean and the USA who converge and form an artistic community in the early 1960s in the most easternly regions of Alphabet City.” — David Henderson, author of ‘Scuse Me While I Kiss The Sky
Inhale the exotic spices from tenement hallways, smell the sweat and garbage in the streets, feel the swelter of summer in the City. Taste the African dishes: rice and pepper sauce, stewed fruits, tagine, okra soup, bread and fish.
Walk the alphabet streets in the daytime, weaving among pushcarts, or at night in the biting winds of winter, footsteps too close at your back. Sway to the cool jazz. Groove to the lilt of African voices reciting poetry, intoning prayers. Follow a junkie riding out a Jones, an anarchist handing out pamphlets, a pacifist leading a draft resister on the Underground route to Canada.
Ismaili is an internationally-renowned poet, and her mastery of language shows! Her richly-evoked setting in this collection of linked short stories presents characters learning to survive in the jazz scene, the theater, and the arts while dealing with interracial relationships, abuse, addiction, and the toll of the Vietnam draft.
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Waterwoman, by Lenore Hart
“Pure as the waters of the pre-industrial Chesapeake … utterly convincing and beautifully sensual. You feel the shell cuts, the pull of the nets.” — Baltimore Sun
“Hart reaches surprising emotional depths with her exploration of sibling rivalry, familial commitment, and social taboos.” — Publisher’s Weekly
“A gripping story with an admirable, complex heroine … The love and rivalry between the sisters will strike a chord with teens.” — Booklist
“Like the watermen that people her novel, Hart has learned the tools of her craft.” — Salisbury NC Post
“… Hart creates a believable world where tragedy does not always equal hopelessness, a place where you don’t always get what you want, but if you’re strong, you find reasons to go on living anyway.” — Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
Even as a child, plain, boyish Annie Revels had everyone’s role figured out. Everyone’s, that is, except her own. Her sickly mother needed to be taken care of. Her little sister Rebecca was beautiful, where Annie was not. Her father was a waterman, a free-looking life Annie envied and could’ve had, if only she’d been born a son.
Tiny, remote Revels Island, a barrier island off the Eastern Shore, knows nothing of the partying, gin-soaked Roaring Twenties, which grip the rest of the country. The family depends on the coastal waters to make a living, and tragedy is always only a bad storm away. As Annie notes, “In order to live on the Shore, you need to understand that good weather always follows bad.”
But when her father dies, suddenly it falls to Annie to take his place aboard the oyster boat and support what’s left of the family. Out there, she finds the only life she could ever really fit into: being a waterman. Until one day, she meets Nathan…
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Now available as an audiobook! Read by Julie Yelen.
The Only Thing to Fear, by David Poyer
“A flight of the historical imagination that will leave readers dazzled.” — Thomas Fleming
It is the apocalyptic spring of 1945. Navy Reserve Lieutenant John F. Kennedy, convalescing from action in the Pacific, is transferred to President Franklin Roosevelt’s personal staff. But Kennedy finds Washington is more than cocktail parties, easy tail, and press conferences when Fleet Admiral Leahy assigns him an undercover mission – a deadly race to stop a possible assassin in the White House.
With the help of Lauren Wolfe, beautiful actress and FDR admirer, and Secret Service head Mike Reilly, Kennedy must turn detective, as the clock ticks down to the fateful moment when a shadowy traitor will attempt to alter the course of history.
Trade Paperback, $14.95 Ebook Edition, $4.99
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Northampton House Press 